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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"This is not an autobiographical novel," an author's note warns at the start of "Don't Point That Thing at Me" (Overlook; $13.95), by the British author Kyril Bonfiglioli. "It is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer." The dealer in question, Charlie Mortdecai, is also an occasional art thief, and at the opening of the novel there is an old gilt frame burning in the fireplace of his Mayfair penthouse, a Goya stolen from the Prado possibly hidden under his valuable Savonnerie rug, and, standing more or less on the rug, a hated antagonist from a special branch of the police:
Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly. . . . Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor '31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn't notice: score two to me.
This is the quintessential Mortdecai voice: arch and insufferably, authoritatively snobbish. The effortless brio of Mortdecai's narration and the outrageousness of his prejudices have insured a following for the Mortdecai novels even while they have been out of print, and have led to their revival nearly twenty years after the death of their author. In England, Kyril Bonfiglioli's three main novels have been available as a Penguin paperback trilogy for a few years. Here, Overlook Press is starting out with just the first novel, "Don't Point That Thing at Me," perhaps anxious about the possible effects of exposing the American reading public to too much Mortdecai all at once.
One reason that Bonfiglioli's books have never quite found the readership they deserve is that, although they are ostensibly crime novels, they are far too badly behaved--too full of improbability and capricious digression--to please crime fans. The plot of "Don't Point That Thing at Me" (first published in 1973) is too complicated to be properly explained, and much too silly. Briefly, Mortdecai arranges the theft of the Goya for an American oil tycoon who has also become involved in blackmailing someone high up in the British government. Pretty soon, the secret services of Britain and America, and maybe even the associates of the tycoon, want Mortdecai dead, for various reasons. As chaotic as it is, this plot looks positively Aristotelian compared with that of the sequel, "After You with the Pistol" (1979), a teetering construction involving Chinese tongs, white slavers,...
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